by Paul Lisicky
Ptown
The name Ptown will never come out of my mouth, even though some I love will always call it that. Maybe it tends toward the slick. Maybe it edits out the unruly (that extra syllable), refuses to see anything beyond the party and the myth. Isn’t that what Ptown suggests, Party town? But I love the party up against the struggles and failures behind shut doors, all the aspects of a place that can’t be categorized, monetized, branded, sold, known. Leave Ptown—I’m sorry—to the people who call San Francisco Frisco. Who’ve left their hearts out there.
Mary Oliver
“Provincetown is the closest I have ever been to being a member of a society, a person in a community of people.”
Myth
To live in Town is not so much to live in other places, where you’re usually so inside the place you can’t even see it. To live in Town is to explain it to others in an ongoing, continuous way that involves standing outside it—even if you’re walking down its streets.
7
Canines
There are many smiles involved in cruising. First comes the smile across the room, or across the street. This smile is the drop of fishing-line, a letter addressed to whomever receives it. The first smile communicates the cruiser’s interest and availability; ideally, this smile meets with a smile that communicates a specular interest on the part of the other. If smile no. 1 is not met by smile no. 2, smile no. 1 may as well not have occurred. It is a tree falling in a forest without [an] audience.
MICHAEL SNEDIKER, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions
The man I’ll call Philippe works in a gallery with an uncharacteristically flat roof and windows on three sides. He is skinny, slightly younger than I am, maybe twenty-eight, with golden-brown curls, high cheekbones, blue eyes. There is a crackle of sexual energy about him, an intensity that would suggest he wouldn’t know how to be bored. He has the demeanor of someone who just discovered sex and is tremendously excited by it, versus that of someone who’s weary of all its calculations—sex had gotten that other person into trouble, but not Philippe. Philippe smiles at me one day, from across Bradford Street, as we’re walking in opposite directions, he toward L&A Market, I toward the Work Center. I smile back. He is handsome enough to be one of those people who always looks past and over you, but he chooses not to, and I like that. How could I not?
In more ways than one he resembles an iconic figure in a porn film, riding around on a tractor, with a hay stalk between his teeth, pointing it up, pointing it down, pretending to play the role of a Hollywood leading man on a pig ranch.
I see him around Town a lot after that smile. Now that the weather’s turned colder, he wears a battered black motorcycle jacket, which appears to be his signature. Everyone in Town seems to look like an actor, which makes sense when personality, rather than how much money you make, is the true currency. In his case he looks like a combination of Paul Newman (but younger, more awkward) and Starsky of Starsky and Hutch (but lighter, and less Jewish). His curls are at least a dozen years out of fashion, but he wears them as if he’s confident of the gift they are—neither retro nor stuck in another time. Those curls and those eyes: the blue eyes especially suggest some woundedness, some danger, a need to test a threshold.
One day we end up on my twin bed, which feels like being back in high school. It’s very easy between us, the erotic equivalent of tossing a football back and forth if I knew the first thing about how to toss a football. Or better: maybe we are two canines in the dog park, no human supervisors looking on. Mouth goes to mouth, hand goes to face, hand down to zipper, grabbing and holding on. He’s wearing long johns. I rub his hard, fat dick through the front of his long johns. A guttural, secret parody of an evil laugh that is certainly not a polite laugh. I don’t know whose pants go off first. Because we’re approaching each other with equal intensity, neither of us is cautious or thinks, This is weird. We have the kind of sex that doesn’t really ask much of us, and thus it doesn’t really haunt or cut too deep. It isn’t a transaction involving power. No one is expected to be the boss of it.
He plunks my electronic keyboard afterward, fully dressed now, no shower for either of us, and that is just fine: I like having his grassy scent on me. There is something endearing about the bangy, unsubtle sounds of his playing. He talks about wanting to come back, and I say, “Of course.” Am I already thinking of him as someone I’d like to have sex with again? Maybe because the cloud of boyfriend, and all the social expectations pressuring that word, doesn’t trouble the sky. He feels like someone I’ve known all the way back to high school.
“You shouldn’t have sex with him,” Billy says several days later when I casually ask him if he knows the guy, if he’s ever heard of him. He says it in the voice of an old-school cop who’s seen far too many criminals in Town.
I must look flustered, stupid, a little out of my element.
Billy tells me Philippe has AIDS. And has been very sick in the past, though you’d never know it now.
“But he looks just fine.”
And Billy gives me an exasperated look, as if he shouldn’t need to remind me you can certainly look just fine.
The moment swells. The clock slows as if it’s dragging through maple syrup. I am weary that Philippe is just one more case—how expected. (Fuck it.) It doesn’t even feel like a shock anymore. I am weary that I can’t have the simplest sex without being troubled by questions—did I slip? was it risky to do that thing?—even when I’ve engaged in what’s known as safe sex. And I’m unexpectedly melancholy that Billy would turn in Philippe, as if Philippe is part of some secret criminal gang out to expand its ranks. Such behavior would be condemned by other people with AIDS—Billy knows that very well. But I do not have enough distance to see that Billy is doing to Philippe what others have probably done to Billy again and again.
People take care of each other, and they don’t. Both at the same time.
“Just watch him,” Billy says, quieter, with less force now. Is he just jealous? One former New Boy of Town shrugging away another former New Boy of Town?
But Billy has shrugged me away every time I’ve looked at him with too much fondness, or stood too close to him at a Work Center function while others look on. I’ve given up.
Just the way I’ve given up on Philippe before anything had the chance to develop between us. When I see him from across Bradford Street, I wave, keep walking onward with a brisk and practiced grin. He doesn’t look hurt, even though his posture suggests he’d been hoping I’d stop to say hello. If he’s hurt, he’s learned to hide it well. He knows better than to expect too much of anyone. We all do, sooner or later.
Refugee
Everyone has a designation, everyone is a story. Everyone is seen through the prism of his friends, whether he’s a painter, a carpenter, a fisherman, a drinker, a pastry chef, a real estate agent, a person who grew up in Town or in California. Classes mix; people who have trust funds hide it, and are never caught wearing even a shirt with a collar. That would be the grossest display of indulgence in the last hours of bohemia.
Mostly people work themselves to exhaustion during the four months of summer, and for the rest of the year scrape by, getting through the winter on unemployment or on checks from Medicaid. They might have degrees from Harvard or Yale, or, if closeted, they might have climbed the ranks of the professional world, but they’re never wearing that information on a placard. AIDS takes hold of a life, with all of its ideals and aspirations, and throws it to the pavement like a jar.
“He’s positive,” people say, not with judgment or unkindness, but as if that man were a refugee and he’s never going to see his people again.
Pilgrim
I’ll never forget in 1986, our first fall/winter, going to look at a winter rental, which was a guesthouse. It was during leather week. Entre Nous, it was called. The men were around when [Richard and I] arrived and one was ravaged. Gaunt, KS scars, hollow eyes. He didn’t know us, but he said, “Look at me!
I used to be a model …” and the other men were saying, “Yes—look—we don’t know what to do. This is happening to us.” I have never forgotten it. His leather jacket hanging on him, still handsome, David Bowie–ish. And how candid these men were, it seemed like they needed the witnesses, this young straight couple from another world.
POLLY BURNELL, on moving to Provincetown in 1986
On November 11, 1620, the Pilgrims entered Provincetown Harbor, where they anchored for two weeks after a rough crossing. Today there is evidence of them everywhere, in the names of the streets (Standish, Alden, Bradford, Brewster, Howland, Allerton) and in the Mayflower, the busy restaurant. Town could have made their narrative the centerpiece of its identity, but I wonder whether a few figured out that the brute side of the Pilgrims was at odds with compassion and cosmopolitanism. It wasn’t enough that the Pilgrims were fleeing repression and regulations, in the manner of artists or queer people. Facts: Robbing the graves of the Wampanoag. Thieving their winter provisions, their stash of corn and beans. Not to mention stealing their land, pressuring some to convert, sending others away into slavery, even though they’d once welcomed and befriended the Pilgrims.
So Town leaves that first-landing designation to Plymouth, with its porticoed Rock, one hour across the bay. Town marks their arrival with an ornate monument that appears to have little to do with this history.
Frankly
You can spend the whole evening with someone. You can have the best time, you can say frankly sexual things, but with a laugh, of course, just to send a signal that you know talk like that is trashy. You can hold hands with someone in the backseat of a car. You can rub the knuckle of his thumb as he rubs yours, relieved that the sex between you, once you’re out of the car, is going to be so easy and right. And just when it seems you couldn’t be better matched, one of you will say, It was lovely to meet you, in a tone that attempts to mask that you’ll never be anything more. If the tone were given words it would be something like this: I can’t do this. There’s too much feeling here, and I’ll get pulled under by this feeling. My life will change too much. I’ll lose my compass, my purpose. I’ve worked too hard for my freedom, too hard for my life, and I don’t even care if I end up terribly, terribly alone.
A Thousand Little Grenades
Imagine it. Look at a drop of your blood, your semen, your saliva, and think of it containing a thousand little grenades. Not just for you, but for the lover you came into contact with. How would your life change? Could you disappear into yourself, into your skin, ever again?
Sorrow
Billy and I are driving back from Orleans, after an afternoon spent at the supermarkets and the single big-box store. We’ve enjoyed spending some hours together, clumping together to talk about a new cereal, then breaking apart to go our separate directions. Breaking apart, coming back together; it felt good that way. These trusting repetitions, like swimming laps at the pool of the Provincetown Inn. And just as we go over the hill by the Outer Reach Resort, Town comes into view, the monument, the marsh, the lake, the surface of which is wavier than usual: slate tinged with magenta. “It’s beautiful,” I say, and there’s a sorrow in my voice, whose origins I can’t explain.
And Billy looks at me, not glancingly, but stopping his face on mine, to let me know he means it. “It’s so good to have your energy here,” he says quietly.
My face must fall—or is it a twitch? Maybe I’m just thinking he’s rubbing out the cloth, flattening all my creases. He’s seeing only Billy, not me.
And then I open up again. A single emotion, like being dropped into the lake up ahead, but in summertime. Water as warm as a bath, salty and granular and full of health. For just a minute.
X
Emotionally it’s a full-time job to draw a border between myself and my family, to decide I’m going to reject their unstated rules, their wishes for me. Frankly, I think some structural upheaval would be healthy for all. The unspoken dynamic in my family is that there are two choices—independence and interdependence—and the former is always a threat, without there being any middle space. Can’t they see it? Do they want to? I’m positive they don’t, and even though I can see it, that doesn’t mean I’m not consumed with guilt, a quality I associated with a weak intellect in the past. That guilt is experienced as a sadness so out of sight it causes distraction, an inability to focus on my work, and leaves me with a need for sex as medicine.
Maybe my perceived withdrawal is strengthening the ties between them—now that I’ve given everybody a project, something to bond over. But I shouldn’t so readily be offering myself up for sacrifice, or permitting it. We’ve been caught up in the currents of ancient Catholic ways, even though I grew up in a parish with felt banners, no kneelers, in a half-circular church that conjured up a jazz club. But the surface innovations appeared not to sweep deeper structures away, structures part of some oceanic past in thrall to—what? Secrecy, keeping power over people by naming a few prohibitions but mostly by not naming others. Prohibition: just about anything could fit inside the shape of its X if you allowed it to.
And maybe that’s why my mother makes so much of sex, male sex, though she’d never admit to that. Male sex is uncontrollable, male sex is animal, it opposes us, oppresses us, it’s what ruins the world and that’s why we love it, why we hunger for it so, like we hunger for a father, even a nasty one. It is like nectar, it is our heroin. Milky and rich, filled with the protein and keratin of horns. All the ugliness in the world but within those drops the possibility of care, worth, affection, attention, and every value we can’t name.
And if male sex ran out, there were plenty of other subjects, objects, rituals to fill the old need for withholding. The shape could constantly shift, the value could keep changing. Its purpose was to make all the rules around it impossible, inscrutable. It kept us on our feet. It sent effervescence, if already a little flat, into our veins. In that way the withheld was a little like God.
Cynical Workbook
A friend asks me how the prospect of illness changes people’s experience of identity and time. What does it do to them? I am too close to the question to answer it. I am irritated with my friend for asking it, as if a question so big could be answered succinctly, just as I am irritated with myself for not being articulate, for giving him an opportunity to fill in the hole, which is just a poorly imagined narrative that might come from some cynical workbook. The cynical workbook says that people are preternaturally fucked-up, prone to poisoning themselves and others. The cynical workbook is nourished on the worst clichés of death metal and cyber intelligence. The cynical workbook is above all dismissive of human affection and comfort and the writings of Walt Whitman as if they bathe in a product called Sentimentality.
Maybe the better answer is this: If you are prone to awkwardness, illness might make you more awkward. If you are prone to craziness, it might just make you crazier.
8
Husband
After my reading at the Work Center, I meet somebody I’ve been seeing a lot of around Town. He has presence in his face, an alert and active expression. He’s always looking, whether it’s at people or houses or at the harbor, at low tide, at the end of the street. His eyes are so bright it looks like you could see all the way down into the clear, cold water of him. He is tall, a bit taller than I am, but not taller than Philippe, whom I rarely run into on the street anymore. He is relatively skinny, but carries himself in a way that suggests he wasn’t always skinny; he knows what it’s like to be thicker around the middle. He is a poet. His name is Mark. He speaks about my work like someone who knows his approval matters, and I am in awe, so grateful, my forehead moist with raised temperature.
Beside him is a woman who echoes some of his body language, though not like a wife or girlfriend. She walks with a cane, a stoop in the right shoulder. Has she been in an accident? She might be sixty-eight, or thirty-eight. In that way she has taken herself out of clock time, and it’s no surprise to find out she is a poet too: Ly
nda. Black beaded dress, turban on her head, a cloche. Feathers? People dress up in Town, but she dresses as if she’s in the city, not New York, but Brighton or Prague, in a basement piano bar where the people are too drunk to be jovial. Her outfit is in response to a world in which no one is looking, but we’re looking. Some might say she is a female drag queen, but her style is more idiosyncratic and complicated than that, as she’s not exactly making outsize statements about gender, nor appropriating another era and putting quotation marks around it. She is making something up about discarded things. She is constructing her own vocabulary of beauty. Her look wouldn’t work for everyone, especially for someone who believes that fashion must be in dialogue with trends, but that’s beside the point, which is that it’s far from the standards she grew up with.
“That’s my new husband,” I say to my friends. We are walking down Pearl Street, in the dark, trailing the two poets, who are deep in conversation, walking close enough to be one person. I say it in a loud whisper, as if I half want to be heard by the people ahead of me, and half want to make my friends laugh at the dog of me: it’s the verbal equivalent of wagging my tail. I’m developing a character of myself by this point. I am someone in a comic French film, or Buster Keaton, and it’s a relief to slip into this other creature when I’m inarticulate, and nervous, and humor is the only thing to make the awkwardness of life almost bearable.
